There are many important biological reactions where the substrates are modified by chemical groups that are donated by other substrates, known as activated donor molecules. These biological reactions are broadly recognized as “group transfer reactions” and have the general reaction:                donor-X+acceptor→donor-product+acceptor-X.Typically, donor-X, the activated donor molecule, is a nucleotide attached to a covalent adduct. The donor-X is activated by formation of a phosphoester bond in the nucleotide donor. Also the acceptor substrates can include small molecules or macromolecules such as proteins or nucleic acids. Products of this reaction are the modified acceptor, acceptor-X and the donor-product molecule.        
There are many enzymes that catalyze group transfer reactions such as for example kinases, which use ATP to donate a phosphate group; sulfotransferases (SULTs), which use phosphoadenosine-phosphosulfate (PAPS) to donate a sulfonate group; UDP-glucuronosyltransferases (UGTs), which use UDP-glucuronic acid to transfer a glucuronic acid group; methyltransferases, which use s-adenosyltransferase to donate a methyl group; acetyl transferase, which use acetyl coenzymeA to donate an acetyl group; and ADP-ribosyltransferases, which use nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD) to donate an ADP-ribose group. Thus, many of the enzymes catalyzing group transfer reactions are of interest to pharmaceutical companies.
Automated high throughput screening (HTS) assays are the paradigm for identifying interactions of potential drug molecules with proteins in a drug discovery setting, and this format requires simple, robust molecular assays, preferably with a fluorescent or chemiluminescent readout. The most suitable format for HTS is a homogenous assay, (e.g., “single addition” or “mix and read” assay), which does not require any manipulation after the reaction is initiated and the assay signal can be monitored continuously. Despite their importance from a drug discovery perspective, the incorporation of group transfer enzymes into pharmaceutical HTS programs is being slowed or prevented for a number of reasons: a) homogenous assay methods are not currently available, b) the detection methods used place serious limits on the utility of the assay, and c) the non-generic nature of the assay requires the development of many specific detection reagents to test diverse acceptor substrates.
The approach currently used to identify sulfotransferase substrates or inhibitors requires the use of radioactivity and involves cumbersome post-reaction separation steps, such as precipitation or chromatography. For instance, 35S-PAPS is used in a sulfotransferase reaction and the labeled product is quantified by scintillation counting after selective precipitation of unreacted 35S-PAPS (Foldes, A. and Meek, J. L., Biochim Biophys Acta, 1973, 327:365-74). This approach is not desirable in a high throughput screening (HTS) format because of the high radiation disposal costs and because the incorporation of separation steps complicates the automation process. Other SULT assays have been developed using colorimetric and fluorescent means, but they are dependent on the use of a specific acceptor substrate for detection, so their use is limited to a single SULT isoform, and they cannot be used to screen for diverse substrates (Burkart, M. D. and Wong, C. H., Anal Biochem, 1999, 274:131-7; Frame, L. T., et al., Drug Metab Dispos, 2000, 28:1063-8). As a result, SULT interaction studies are currently not included during the preclinical development of drugs. Also UGTs are currently assayed using radiolabeled donor molecules and require post-reaction separation steps such as thin layer chromatography (TLC) or high pressure liquid chromatography (HPLC) which seriously hampers preclinical HTS programs (Ethell, B. T., et al., Anal Biochem, 1998, 255:142-7). Likewise, traditionally, kinases have been assayed by filter capture or precipitation of radiolabeled polypeptide substrates produced using 32P-ATP or 33P-ATP as donor. However, since this method requires a separation step such as filtering or centrifugation, it cannot be easily adapted to an automated HTS format. Surface proximity assays (SPA) allow radioassays in a multiwell format with no separation (Mallari, R., et al., J Biomol Screen, 2003, 8:198-204) but their use by pharmaceutical companies is declining because of the disposal and regulatory costs of handling radioisotopes.
Because of the high level of interest in developing kinase inhibitor drugs, there has been a great deal of effort among scientists to develop improved assay methods for this enzyme family. Homogenous assay methods have been developed, in which highly specific reagents are used to detect the reaction products in the presence of the other components of the reaction using a light-based readout, such as fluorescence or chemiluminescence. The most common homogenous approach used for kinase assays is immunodetection of phosphopeptide products exhibiting different fluorescence properties (Zaman, G. J., et al., Comb Chem High Throughput Screen, 2003, 6:313-20). In this method, phosphorylation of substrate peptide leads to displacement of a fluorescent phosphopeptide tracer from an anti-phosphopeptide antibody and causes a change in its fluorescence properties. This basic approach has been adapted to several different readout modes used for competitive immunoassays including Fluorescence polarization (FP) (Parker, G. J., et al., J Biomol Screen, 2000, 5:77-88); time resolved fluorescence (Xu, K., et al., J Biochem Mol Biol, 2003, 36:421-5); fluorescence lifetime discrimination (Fowler, A., et al., Anal Biochem, 2002, 308:223-31); and chemiluminescence (Eglen, R. M. and Singh, R., Comb Chem High Throughput Screen, 2003, 6:381-7).
The shortcoming with this approach is the requirement for phosphopeptide-specific antibodies. Though generic phosphotyrosine antibodies are common, phosphoserine and phosphothreonine antibodies are notoriously difficult to produce and only recognize phospho-serine or -threonine in the context of specific flanking amino acids (Eglen and Singh, 2003). There are over 400 kinases in humans and their specificity for phosphorylation sites vary widely. Thus, different antibodies are needed for assaying diverse kinases or profiling acceptor substrates. This greatly complicates the incorporation of new kinases into HTS, especially if their substrate specificity is not well defined. It also creates analysis problems in comparing data among kinases with different substrate selectivities, because the output of the assay depends on the particular antibody (Ab)-phosphopeptide pair used. Although efforts to develop generic phospho-serine antibodies identify more generic kinase substrates continue (Sills, M. A., et al., J Biomol Screen, 2002, 7:191-214), research in this direction has not been very successful to date.
A number of alternative approaches have been developed to circumvent the problem of context-specific Ab-phosphopeptide interactions, including use of metal complexes to bind phosphopeptides (Scott, J. E. and Carpenter, J. W., Anal Biochem, 2003, 316:82-91) and the use of modified ATP analogs that allow covalent tagging of phosphopeptide products (Allison Miller-Wing, E. G., Barbara Armstrong, Lindsey Yeats, Ram Bhatt, Frank Gonzales, and Steven Gessert., SBS 9th Annual Conference and Exhibition, Portland, Oreg., 2003). Chemical phosphate binding reagents suffer from background binding to nucleotide phosphates, requiring the use of very low, non-physiological levels of ATP and limiting assay flexibility. Modified nucleotides do not provide a generic format because the ability to use the ATP analogs as donors varies among kinases, requiring the development of a number of different analogs. Also competition of inhibitors with the modified nucleotides at the kinase ATP binding site—the most frequent site for kinase inhibitor binding—does not reflect the physiological situation. Differences in protease sensitivity caused by peptide phosphorylation have also been exploited in developing fluorescence based kinase assays (Kupcho, K., et al., Anal Biochem, 2003, 317:210-7), but these assays are not truly homogenous; i.e. they require the post-reaction addition of developing protease reagents. In addition, the applicability of this method is limited to peptides where kinase and protease specificity overlap.
There are also a few methods that are dependent on interaction of reaction products with specific multiwell plate chemistries, but these are not truly homogenous in that they require post reaction reagent additions and/or processing. Also the requirement for specialized instrumentation for processing and/or detection does not fit with the open architecture desired by most pharmaceutical HTS platforms.
Furthermore, microfluidics-based kinase assays that rely on electrophoretic separation of reaction products have been developed (Xue, Q., et al., Electrophoresis, 2001, 22:4000-7). In these assays, phosphorylated peptide products are electrophoretically separated from the non-phosphorylated acceptor substrates, thus eliminating the need for specialized detection reagents. However, in practice, the kinase assays are often run in multiwell plates and then the products are transferred to microfluidic devices for separation—a cumbersome process for an HTS format.
In summary, the non-generic nature of the current group transfer assays is resulting in significant expense and delays for drug discovery because of the need to develop assays for individual enzymes or small subgroups within a family. Also, because many of the current assays are based on modification and detection of specific tagged acceptors, there is limited ability for testing different acceptor substrates. Often the tagged acceptor substrates used are different from the substrates that are phosphorylated in vivo, thus the physiological relevance of the assay is questionable. In addition, a major concern in the pharmaceutical industry is that because of the non-generic nature of the current assays, investigators are sometimes forced to use different methods for different kinases. However, studies have shown that there are significant differences in the pharmaceutical targets identified using different assays methods (Sills, M. A., et al., J Biomol Screen, 2002, 7:191-214), which is a significant problem for profiling inhibitor selectivity across several kinases. These shortcomings of the existing HTS assay methods for group transfer reactions are hampering the rapid analysis of important enzyme families in pharmaceutical drug discovery programs.
Other existing approaches for assaying group transfer reactions have been to enable screening of diverse chemicals as substrates for group transfer reactions by detecting the donor molecule product, because it is the same regardless of the acceptor being modified. Detection of the donor product has been thought to provide the basis of a generic assay method, ADP is always a product of a kinase reaction and phosphoadenosine-phosphate (PAP) is always the product of a sulfotransferase reaction. Detection of these products, however, is complicated because the cleaved mono- and di-nucleotides cannot be differentiated from the activated donor molecules based on absorbance or fluorescence properties because for example ADP has the same fluorescence and absorbance properties as ATP. Separation of the donor product from the donor can be effected using chromatographic methods, such as thin layer chromatography or high pressure liquid chromatography, but incorporation of these methods into an HTS format is cumbersome.
To circumvent this difficulty, detection of the donor product has been achieved by using additional enzymes to generate a detectable product from the primary reaction product—the cleaved mono- or di-nucleotide; this is known as an enzyme coupled reaction. For instance, enzymes and other small molecules can be used for ADP-dependent generation of NADPH, which is detected by absorbance or fluorescence at 340 nm (Walters, W. P. and Namchuk, M., Nat Rev Drug Discov, 2003, 2:259-66). An enzyme coupled reaction has also been developed for UGTs, another type of group transfer enzyme (Mulder, G. J. and van Doorn, A. B., Biochem J, 1975, 151:131-40). However, the optical interference of drug compounds with absorbance assays, especially in the ultra violet, is a widely recognized problem with this approach. Another shortcoming of this approach is that all of the enzymes used to couple the detection are subject to potential inhibition from the chemicals being screened.
Another generic approach is to monitor ATP consumption using Luciferase as a reporter to detect protein kinase activity. An example of this method was disclosed by Crouch et al., in U.S. Pat. No. 6,599,711. Their method entailed determining the activity of a protein kinase to be tested by adding a substrate capable of being phosphorylated by the protein kinase to a solution having ATP and a protein kinase to be tested, and another solution having ATP in the absence of the kinase to be tested. The concentration or the rate of time change of ATP and/or ADP was then measured using bioluminescence. However this assay is not optimal because it relies on small decreases in a high initial signal. The need to keep ATP concentrations low to minimize background results in nonlinear reaction kinetics if assay conditions are not carefully controlled. In a related method, competition binding assays using fluorescent ATP analogs have also been developed, but these do not give a measure of enzyme catalytic activity, thus are of limited utility.
The use of enzymes that catalyze group transfer reactions into HTS assays has been hampered by the lack of universal, homogenous assay methods that are not subject to interference from molecules in pharmaceutical drug libraries. Accordingly, it would generally be desirable to provide universal methods for assaying enzymes involved in group transfer reactions that are well suited for HTS drug discovery.